Max Mosley at the FIA Press Conference after Imola 1994

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2 ай бұрын

On 4 May 1994, three days after the conclusion of the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix, the President of the FIA, Max Mosley, held a press conference at the headquarters at Place de la Concorde in Paris. That evening, large portions of the press conference were broadcast in the opening 22 minutes of this Eurosport magazine about Imola.
00:00 [Eurosport’s Allard Kalff]
00:28 Criticism of ban on electronic driver aids
01:29 Criticism against the FIA from Alain Prost and others
03:23 1990 Imola circuit inspection
04:23 Rubens Barrichello’s accident in Friday qualifying
05:28 Roland Ratzenberger’s accident in Saturday qualifying
08:36 Ayrton Senna’s accident in the race
12:06 [Eurosport’s Allard Kalff]
13:21 Safety measures: Pit lane & pit stops
15:43 Safety measures: Engines & aerodynamics
20:23 Safety measures: Head & neck protection
21:10 Investigation of Ratzenberger’s and Senna’s accidents
21:59 [Eurosport’s Allard Kalff]
Unfortunately, some portions of the press conference were left out of the Eurosport magazine. The start accident, in which several spectators were injured by debris, is not dealt with at all. The pit lane accident, in which several mechanics were injured by a wheel that had come loose, is only touched on very briefly.
Although Elio de Angelis had been killed at an F1 test at Paul Ricard in 1986, and Martin Donnelly had been seriously injured in qualifying for the 1990 Spanish Grand Prix at Jerez, Roland Ratzenberger and Ayrton Senna were the first drivers to be fatally injured during a Formula One Grand Prix weekend since 1982 when both Gilles Villeneuve and Riccardo Paletti were killed, at the Belgian and the Canadian Grand Prix respectively.

Пікірлер: 28

@tomsmalley8899 Ай бұрын

To be fair Max immediately got to grips with safety following the tragedy of Imola & he never stopped

@GreatCdn59 Ай бұрын

oh man, I guess I never really watched Barrichello's accident carefully (or at least in slow-motion), but when that nose plants into the ground at 5:15 , look at that helmet, absolutely SMASHING the steering wheel

@HangoverTelevision Ай бұрын

not just that - in general you see that in these days the driver had to absorb basically all the energy. The car stops abruptly once it hits the tyre walls or any kind of wall, because there simply wasn't any kind of crash structure. It's something Niki Lauda also mentioned after the accidents.

@TroystonB Ай бұрын

ya he was a lucky man.

@AutoRockinRacing94 Ай бұрын

9:26 welp, that's an inconvenient time to play the raw audio of the accident while Max was explaining things.

@SiVlog1989 Ай бұрын

The thing that Max Mosely missed is that there had been cars with a lot more power available than the cars did in 1994. 1986 featured the most powerful engines F1 has ever seen, Gerhard Berger, who raced in that time, described them as "rockets", especially in qualifying trim (the BMW M12 4 cylinder turbo produced around 1500BHP by 1986 and Renault tested one of their V6 engines on a dyno in that time and it went off the scale, beyond the calibrated 1500BHP the machine could measure). Although he was right in the rules changes brought in for 1994 didn't have any input in the accidents at Imola, they did nonetheless have an impact, the aids which helped driver safety, were taken away without slowing the cars down as well. The Williams in particular, had been designed around Active Suspension, but without it in use, it was aerodynamically unstable. Even after the measures brought in in the wake of Imola didn't stop the big accidents, leaving drivers getting hurt. Pedro Lamy, for example, was testing for Lotus at Silverstone, when his car suffered a rear wing failure approaching Abbey (which was a flat out left hander at the time). The cars crashed so violently that not only did Lamy end up with severe injuries to his legs and a broken wrist, but the cars ended up in a spectator enclosure, which thankfully was empty due to being a test day and not a race day

@HangoverTelevision Ай бұрын

IMola 1994 was the clash of 2 worlds. Old F1 meeting new F1. The old cars were far stiffer and bigger than 1994's cars. In 1994 everything was going into the direction of smaller cars, lesser weight etc. - PLUS the position of the drivers changed dramatically too. While in 1986 the driver was still quite in front to counter balance the weight of the engine, the drivers in 1994 were already lying in a "tub" basically. When it gets to the teams themselves: some engineers still had the mentality of "let's just put things on the car and try it out on the track". In terms of Senna: the engineer added a metal rod as extension to the steering column before the race or before the Warm Up, but without knowing 1) is that rod from a metal which is even usable for that? 2) is this rod even usable for welding? 3) will a welding seam even hold? 4) will all this even withstand the G Forces from the sides and from the bumpy ground? I guess they were still going by that: "If a driver notices something, he will simply stop and pull into the pits." - Senna appearently noticed something was wrong on Lap 6 already from all the on board footage, but the pressure he made on himself perhaps or the pressure from outside to "win" made him simply continue and not just pull into the pits to retire the car or to have it checked. Senna could have won the world championship if the season had continued like it continued, easily - even with Schumi winning the opening 3 races and Senna having 0 points. But what I'm saying is: it's up to the team to provide a car, which is safe, it's not up for the driver to decide whether a technical issue will lead to retirement.

@SiVlog1989 Ай бұрын

@HangoverTelevision even with the steering situation, it was sheer bad luck that Senna hit the wall at Tamburello at the angle he did. Aside from his fatal head injury, the rest of his body was uninjured. As one of the journalists who contributed to the film "Senna" pointed out, "if that piece of assembly [that his him on the head] had gone 6 inches higher or lower [than it did], he would have walked back to the pits." I agree that, especially with the later B spec car, Senna could at the very least have challenged Schumacher for the 1994 title. Ronald would have survived if he had a HANS device and if there had been a side crash test in 1994, no holes in the tub would have appeared due to the impact. Ayrton, in turn, if his Williams had a halo equipped, he would have been better protected, and if wheel tethers were a thing in 1994, the wheel that broke off and hit his head would have had at least restrained the momentum it had, while helping spread energy with debris pouring off the car due to the impact (as you probably know, the more spectacular a crash looks, the more items fall off the car during an accident, the greater chance of survival the driver has)

@HangoverTelevision Ай бұрын

@@SiVlog1989 1) from all we know Senna's head injury wasn't just from the piece of suspension, because there was no protection of the helmet around the cockpit, his helmet stroke the wall. Plus as mentioned in the other comment below, most of the impact energy had to be absorbed by the driver. 2) even with HANS a head-on crash into a concrete wall at 313 km/h is not surivable, not even in a road car.

@AlonsoRules 29 күн бұрын

11 years later, he would not allow a compromise at Indianapolis to allow a race to happen. He was quick to slow the cars down in 1994 with stupid tyre chicanes and emasculating corners like Stowe but when there was a problem with a tyre, he shrugged it off.

@hermanthetosser4219 Ай бұрын

9:26 perez had an accident simular to this one... At the monaco 2024 race

@HangoverTelevision Ай бұрын

you're not really telling me you're comparing a rather low-speed crash into a guardrail with a high-speed crash head on into a concrete wall. And compare a 1994 car with hardly any crash-structure and head protection with a 2024 car which has like all kinds of safety parts.

@stefano_stevens Ай бұрын

@@HangoverTelevision Senna hit the wall at approximately 215 km/h. Less than several crashes. Also the deceleration wasn't so extreme. The angle wasn't severe as well and the car dissipated cinetic energy in over 100 m after the impact.

@HangoverTelevision Ай бұрын

@@stefano_stevens the deceleration when you hit a concrete wall is extreme, because the car is stopp from the high speed to 0. All the energy is absorbed by the car and the driver, which is why his Williams was thrown back onto the track and even span around. this isn't survivable in a road car either, even with all the safety systems installed nowadays.

@stefano_stevens Ай бұрын

@@HangoverTelevision at the time the tyre barriers weren't considered a good option because there weren't modern absorbing technology (the decision was made even after a meeting before Imola 90). The risk was an incident "Schumacher 1999 style " where the car stop immediately. Senna's FW16 stopped his run over 100 meters from the impact point. If the car had stopped near the concret, inside the tyres, and not 100+ meters after, the deceleration would have been much much bigger.

@HangoverTelevision Ай бұрын

@@stefano_stevens you can see on Ruben's accident, that tyre walls would have also abruptly stopped Senna's car indeed. But back then tyre walls were also not mounted at all, they were loosely put around without mounts, without a rubber band in front of it etc. - so the next risk would have been, even if the car had a "softer" landing in a certain angle, that the tyres would come lose and roll around the track, hitting either the impact-car driver's head or maybe hit other cars or even other driver's heads. In terms of Schumi's accident in 1999, he want at a 90° angle into the barriers, comparable to Panis accident in 1997. Getting back to Senna's accident: a run is only "stopped" if an object is at 0 km/h.